December 31, 2002:

How do we characterize a year? What will we
remember about 2002? It's the last palindromic year until 2112, even though
we just had one a few years ago, in 1991. (What's so special about us
that we should merit two such rare creatures in only eleven years? Most
people live and die without ever seeing one.) There was a wondrous
Leonid meteor storm in November, albeit one marred by a full moon.

And me? It was the year I developed a taste for salt licorice. It was
the year I wrote (most) of a brand new solo book, my first since 1989.
(No, my novel doesn't count, sigh.) It was the year The Coriolis Group
died, and Paraglyph Press rose from the bitter ash. It was the year we
decided to sell this house and build a new, custom house in Colorado Springs,
with category five network cable in every room. (I know too much about
Wi-Fi to depend on it exclusively!) It was the year I first set foot in
Germany, and found the name of my great-great-great-great-great-great
grandfather, Christof Duntemann 1687-1738. It was the year I turned 50,
and discovered that 50 isn't so bad after allespecially with a spouse
as grand as Carol standing by my side.

It was the first year in several in which no one in our family died.
Deo gratias.

All-in-all, a pretty good, slightly dull (especially in technology) but
reasonably upbeat year. One could dwell on the economy, or the looming
pushover of Iraq, or whatever one might choose to focus on as the herald
of the eschaton. But the world's still here, and I am pleased to report
many small victories: Coriolis renegades getting jobs, the entry of brand
new friends like Valerie Kane and David Beers, falling prices on computers
and networking gear, baby quail drinking from the water bowl, and a quiet
sense that perhaps things aren't as bad as we've become used to assuming.

Carol and I will be heading over to visit friends in a few minutes, to
see out this good year and hope for a better one, palindromic or not.
Good luck to all of you who read this, and thanks for stopping by and
listening to this bald-headed middle-aged white boy wander on about the
world at large. You mean more to me than I expect you'll ever understand.

So let's turn the page and continue the story. The book is good, and many
chapters are left. No one knows the ending, but y'know, I just have this
hunch that the best is yet to come.

December 29, 2002:

Esther
Schindler sent me a link to a site that presents Star
Wars Origami. It's one of those things that I suppose anybody could
do, but to see it done this well (for example, Master Yoda at left) is
properly astonishing. Elsewhere on the site are most of the major spacecraft
of the five episodes so far, an Imperial Walker, R2D2, a destroyer droid,
the Death Star, and a few other odds and ends.

Mercifully, there is no attempt at Senator Padme, Senator (!!) Jar Jar Binks,
or Anakin Skywalker. Also surprisingly, nobody tried to do an origami lightsaber.
C'mon, guys, get with it!

December 27, 2002:

Carol
and I speak frequently of "comfort food," that is, food that
we associate with the sense of comfort, security, and belonging of childhood.
It's different things for different people; for her it was pork roast,
for me it was beef barley soup (see my entry for January 26, 2001) and
Jello instant chocolate pudding.

I was out in the garage today, and in looking at my 1960's-vintage Triplett
multimeter, I realize that it's a sort of "comfort meter." I have
a modern Fluke digital voltmeter (DVM) with far greater precision and the
near-infinite input isolation of a vacuum-tube voltmeter (VTVM) but I just
don't love it as much. About all I can figure is that the Triplett was the
meter that all of us preteen electronics nerds lusted after in 1965 but
could never afford. (I recall it costing well over 100 1965 dollars in the
1965 Allied Radio drool book.) I bought a Triplett on the used market five
or six years ago, and I use it in prefererence to all the other odd DVMs
I have lying around, including my far superior Fluke. It just feels right
somehow; trustworthy, comprehensible, anddare I admit it?a badge
of success. I couldn't own one in 1965, but I have one now. And while it's
true that an analog meter (one with a needle that moves) can show you changes
in voltage or current with far more clarity than unmoving digits on an LCD
display, I don't think that's adequate to explain my affection for it. It
reminds me of wanting to be an electronics ace instead of a lonely 12-year-old,
and now that I am an electronics ace (and a successful 50-year-old with
a loving wife and cool house and all the resistors I can ever use) it reminds
me that I won that particular war. Yes, a comfort meter. Everybody should
have one.

December 25, 2002:

The Christmas bubbler is still bubbling (see
yesterday's entry) and Christmas day dawned bright, clear, and cold here.
(Ok, cold for Arizona. 37°.) I'm taking a few days off writing on
my book, which is almost done anyway, to enjoy the Christmas season with
Carol and decompress. I've written almost 120,000 words in less than six
months, and I'm a little tired. Carol and I wish you all the best this
Christmas season, and a new year with a little more sizzle and a little
less frazzle.(My #1 New Year's resolution, furthermore, is to start taking
my own advice.)

So. What is Christmas? Let's get past all the ugly arguments about whether
Jesus Christ ever lived, or even granting that, whether he was God. Faith
seems to touch some and pass others by, and that's a mystery we may never
crack in this life. Whatever else you may make of it, Christmas is the
start of a very good story: of a God who entered a terribly flawed world
in order to rekindle Hope. He did it by becoming one of us, and in the
course of His life faced all the hassles that we have to face: growing
up, temptation, hard work, suffering, frustration, betrayal, lonliness,
and death. And on the end of it all he added the profound strangeness
of resurrection, to remind us that even death isn't the end.

Some characterize Christian history as the tension between Faith and
Love, Paul and James, Augustine and Pelagius, damnation and salvation.
True enough, and it's an interesting history, if darker than I like to
think. Still, that's history; i.e., 20-20 hindsight. I differ with most
of my Christian fellows in that I think the ending of the story has never
been in doubt: Nothing will be wasted, no one will be left behind, God
never loses. Period. Perhaps that makes me the sole member of the
Pollyannic Old Catholic Church, but if so, hey, I could do worse.

On this beautiful Christmas Day, I exhort you to Hope. Not only is the universe
stranger than we can possibly imagine, it is also better than we can possibly
understand. There are more than a few surprises left in store. Good luck
and keep plugging. Don't sit there staring at the glass and wondering, Is
it half full or half empty? Instead, try and figure out where you're going
to put the overflow!

December 24, 2002

Everybody
loves stories of Christmas miracles; well, here's ours. Some years ago
someone gave us a Christmas night light: One of those Fifties-style bubbler
lights with a ceramic Santa riding on it, mounted on a little base that
you plug into an electric outlet. We plugged it in this Christmas about
two weeks ago, and after bubbling for a day and a night, it stopped. Now,
I thought I understood the physics of those things (it's a glass tube
of ether heated by a light bulb) but it's kind of a head-scratcher why
one of them would decide to stop bubbling if the glass tube were intact
and the bulb still burning.

Cute as it is, we were going to pitch itand then, yeserday afternoon,
it started bubbling again, and this morning it's still going strong.

Miracle? Or physics? I think I know. I challenge you to figure it out as
well. Think about it and send me a note!

December 21, 2002:

From the No Honor Among Thieves department:
The last really successful song-swapping service, Kazaa, is being pursued
around the world by the music industry, who are having a very hard time
convincing several foreign governments that it should be stamped out.
(The rulers of Tuvalu, whereverthehell that is, don't have the
same priorities as Hollywood, and on the balance that's a good thing.)
Interestingly, that's the way the creators of Kazaa intended to do it,
having watched Napster and Audiogalaxy get pulverized by the RIAA.

Now, Kazaa faces an entirely different threat: An enterprising and more-or-less
anonymous Russian chap has taken a copy of the ad-supported Kazaa peer-to-peer
client program, stripped out the ad support, and is freely distributing
the ad-free Kazaa as Kazaa Lite. I tested Kazaa well over a year ago, found
it wanting (it turned up none of the sort of unobtanium I used to search
for on the song sites) and the adware made me crazy. I downloaded Kazaa
Lite to see the truth of the story, and yup, it's really Kazaa minus the
ads. I can't imagine that over another few months, Kazaa Lite won't completely
replace Kazaa itself, and without the ads the business model evaporates.
What all the money and lawyers in Hollywood couldn't do, an anonymous hacker
with some assembly smarts and a debugger may accomplish. What a crazy business.
I think my assembly language book (which I considered almost a throwaway
when I wrote it back in 1989) has a long and vigorous life ahead of it.

December 20, 2002:

Well, Joss Whedon's "SciFi-Western"
Firefly has been officially cancelled by Fox, and barring an unforseen
resurrection on some other network (fans mutter about UPN) tonight's episode
will be the last. This is a shame, as it was the first truly compelling
piece of TV I've seen in almost fifteen years, since Carol and I used
to watch Thirtysomething and The Wonder Years while brushing
dogs back in Scotts Valley.

I had a little fun with the show in my September 21, 2002 entry, but
in truth that first episode was one of the weaker ones. Most of the shows
had very little "western" in them, and the better ones, in fact,
were the ones that had none at all. The writing was generally intelligent,
though the show's creators dance lightly explaining how they flit from
star to star so quickly. (There is no mention of hyperdrives of any flavor.)
The show makes some odd assumptions, like an insistence that "real"
fruits and vegetables will be rare and expensive, even on rural fringe
planets that do little else but farming. (The luscious Jewel Staite ate
a fat strawberry in tonight's episode with such skillful longing that
it came close to being erotica.) That's just stupid, and in a craft the
size of Serenity they could easily manage a hydroponics garden
if they were that hungry for tomatoes.

On the other hand, the CGI starships and planetscapes were startlingly
good, and the gritty reality of life in the 2600s was very convincing.
Some have objected to the western motifs, like having people ride horses
out to meet a starship. Well, duhh: Until two Hummers can get together
and make a third without human intervention, people will continue to ride
horses. I think Captain Malcolm Reynolds' long-barrelled revolver is perhaps
an objectionable anachronism. On the other hand, all the other guns look
acceptably modern and high-tech, especially the frightening monstrosity
Adam Baldwin trots out with relish anytime he can.

I keep comparing Firefly to the Trek shows, with the hideous cardboard
acting, aliens who look mostly like ugly humans, and worst of all, a mocking
doubletalk attitude toward science that drove me away from the franchise
early on: "Captain, I've just detected a previously unknown subspace
endoelectrochronic stream of hyperquantum radiation that, if I can stretch
this explanation out long enough, may get us out of this plot complication!"
There's really no comparison. Trek was bold and innovative in 1966, when
I saw it first-run. Having a bald captain in Trek's second coming was
about as clever as it got, and even Jean Luc got boring soon after. The
writing on Firefly was pretty good, the acting even better, and
once I figured out the show's conventions, it all hung together remarkably
well. I startle to watch myself write the following sentence: I'm going
to miss watching TV every Friday night...

Egad.

December 19, 2002:

While searching for a book on Amazon today,
their ever-present referral machinery posted a list of other things I
might like, under the heading, "Customers who wear clothes also shop
for..." Yes, I've been known to wear clothes on occasion, as do most
people I knowlike, well, all of them. I flashed back to a dopey
article I read somewhere back in the 1970s, predicting the imminent demise
of underwear. The author breathlessly told me, "You'd be surprised
how many people are completely naked under their clothes!"

Nope. Not surprised at all.

December 17, 2002:

Still plugging hard on the bookI wrote
an entire 5300-word chapter yesterday, from beginning to end, and drew
five Visio figures for it, all in one screaming 12 1/2 hour day. I hope
to get the last of it done and turned in within a week, and although I
might miss it, I won't miss it by much.

My ad-hoc problem seems to be one of hostname propagation. Although I can
ping any IP from any other IP, one of my Win2K machines can't ping any hostname
in the ad-hoc group but its own. Any ideas where I should look? Admittedly,
I don't have time to poke deeply at it right now, but eventually I have
to figure this one out.

December 15, 2002:

There's an odd little corner of Wi-Fi functionality
that almost nobody writes anything about: "Ad-hoc" mode, in
which multiple client adapters (like laptops with wireless cards installed)
connect directly with one another without the intermediation of an access
point. All of the Wi-Fi books I've bought (which by now is nearly all
of them) mention it as something that Wi-Fi hardware can do, but none
of them explains how to set it up.

I think I now know why: Windows isn't a real ace at dealing with an underlying
ad-hoc Wi-Fi connection. I have four Windows machines here, and today
I tried getting them all to cooperate in a single ad-hoc network. Three
of them are Windows 2000 machines, and the fourth is my new, tiny XP machine,
which I described here in my October 22, 2002 entry. Ordinarily they cooperate
just fine when they're talking to my router over CAT5 cable. Disable the
router and all the wired network adapters, and they just can't all get
into an ad-hoc connection. Two of the Win2K machines establish a network
perfectly with one another, and can be found via explorer in My Network
Places. I can browse and move files between them as on the wired network.
The other two show up in My Network Places by name, but when I try to
browse their shares I get an error block reading "\\Nutmeg (or whatever)
is not accessible. The network path was not found."

The wireless Ethernet connection itself (OSI levels 1 and 2) seems to
be intact and fully functional. (It's a great deal like the old Thinnet
architecture, with machines on a string of coax, in fact, in that everybody
sees everybody's traffic and shares common bandwidth.) All machines have
APIPA running and everybody is giving himself an IP in the same block/subnet.
The third Win2K machine can ping and be pinged but I can't browse its
shares from the other machines. (I can browse its shares from its own
explorer windows, however.) And my damned XP machine seems to want to
stand apart from everybody, won't ping, can't be pinged.

I'll be the last to call myself a networking expert, but I'm not all that
dumb, and the four misfits talk very well among themselves when they're
all on the router via cable. Any suggestions? I suspect I need to learn
more about XP networking, but I'm pretty comfortable with Win2K. Where should
I look? What should I try? Have any of you had any similar problems with
Wi-Fi ad-hoc mode? Or I am only the seventeenth person in history ever to
attempt to use it?

December 14, 2002:

The problem with legislating morality is that
legislation is almost invariably flawed, and bad laws mandating moral
behavior deprecate the whole idea of morality. Inside nearly all
modern laws you'll see shadows of the back rooms in which laws are forged:
Biases, agendas, vendettas, and compromises cut to break deadlocks between
opposing factions. Morality, if it is to have any meaning at all, must
transcend such things, because if it doesn't, it loses whatever authority
it might have by appealing to our higher human impulses.

Basically, coat a golden idol in filth and no one will worship it. Politics
as we know it today may be necessary filth, but it's still filth, and unless
we can persuade people that there is objective value in acting morally (other
than the negative value of not being thrown in the slammer) morality merges
with politics and becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the filth.
Moral education (which is really about personal integrity and not just sex;
sex, in fact, is a relatively small part of it) has mostly gone away, and
that is probably the greatest single threat to democracy that we have.

December 13, 2002:

Slashdot reports persistent rumors that Microsoft
will try to buy Borland early next year. This is appalling for a lot
of reasons, overwhelmingly because it will mean the end of Delphi and
Kylix. Microsoft has done this sort of thing before: They bought FoxPro,
a decent database manager, and then starved it to death while relentlessly
promoting Access.

Not much competes with Visual Basic these days except Delphi. One would
think this sort of thing would be at the heart of antitrust challenges,
but still they fuss endlessly over whether or not you can get rid of Internet
Explorer, as though that's the only thing Microsoft ever did that matters.

December 12, 2002:

I'm usually the guy who gets all the email viruses
here (and that's "gets" as in "receives") but this
morning Carol got one that I haven't seen before, and it's novel not for
the sake of the virus (which was plain old garden-variety Klez) but for
the social engineering it represented.

It was a fake bounced email, allegedly of a message Carol sent to someone
whose email address is unknown to us. It was from "Postmaster"
with all the usual verbiage you get from email server robots when mail
bounces, yatta yatta yatta. Inside the body of the fake message it said,
"The message body is in the attachment." In a holdover from
our dialup days, Carol leaves message attachments on the server unless
she feels they're worth downloading; this because one of our friends had
the habit of sending out inspirational pictures etc. on a regular basis,
some of which were immense. So the attachment never came down, but the
name of the attachment (all.scr) set off some alarms in my head.

People who do a lot of email might be scratching their heads looking
at the email from which the message had allegedly bounced, wondering,
"Now who the hell was that?" The next step, of course,
is to open the bounced email and look at it, at which point (at least
for those without virus protection) all.scr executes, and the game is
oversimply because Windows thinks "open" should mean "execute."

Brilliant scam. Now shall we go out, find, and exile to Iraq (or better
yet, North Korea) the guy who decided that "Open" should mean
"Execute?" In my view, "open" means "examine the
data" as in "look at what this thing is made of." To open
a binary should mean display a hexdump, not run the damned thing. A great
deal of what is wrong with computing today (including most of what we call
"adverse execution") comes from that simple "mistake."
I guess it's too late to fix it, though somebody could probably make some
money selling an Outlook Express clone that would "open" attachments
without running them. Any takers out there?

December 9, 2002:

Doing a tough schedule on the Wi-Fi book still,
so entries will remain a little sparse for a couple of weeks yet.

I did see in this morning's Wall Street Journal that New Line
Cinema, having made over a billion dollars so far on Lord of the Rings,
has optioned His Dark Materials and has begun work on a screenplay.
The first film would appear in 2005. One must smile: Will they dare to
depict God the Father as a doddering old man who falls out of his sedan
chair and crumbles to dust?

Also, I didn't know until this morning that New Line Cinema had originally
been formed 35 years ago to distribute the famous Depression-era propaganda
short, Reefer Madness, to college campuses. I saw it back in 1971
or so and considered it less funny than sad. Truth has suffered the most
in the drug wars, with the rule of law close behind.

Coming to a personal position on stuff like marijuana has been difficult
here. Neither drugs nor booze have ever held much attraction for me, and
I've often wondered why these primal pleasures get such a fatal grip on
certain people and not others. The big question is really balancing the
rights of a free people to do what they choose against the inevitable problem
of people who can't help making bad decisions and thereby destroy themselves.
I'm not willing to simply throw such people to the wolves, as the Ayn Rand
crowd thinks we must. On the other hand, destroying young lives for posessing
small amounts of what may have no worse effects than alchohol is no less
cruel and makes the law look arbitrary and corrupt. What to do? I don't
know. Like so much in this troubled age, there may be no answer at all.

December 5, 2002:

United Airlines is in very serious trouble,
and if its mechanics union doesn't agree to significant pay cuts and other
cost reductions, the airline will probably go into receivership. Most
people haven't paid a lot of attention to United's plight, but there's
something remarkable going on: a plebiscite of sorts on employee ownership
of large corporations. 55% of United is owned by its employees, including
its unionized employees, and its unions are in a really odd spot: Schooled
in the ancient art of adversary relationships, they are meeting the enemy,
and they are themand they don't quite know how to deal with it.

Insiders tell us that United's unions have had second and third thoughts
about owning the operation. Certainly, controlling the board of directors
and having veto power over most major corporate decisions would seem to
be hawg heaven for a union. On the other hand, once costs spiral completely
out of sync with the market for what is really a commodity product (air
travel) who can the unions blame? It's just not in their book of standard
operating procedures.

Employees hold stock, but if the airline goes into bankruptcy proceedings,
that stock becomes effectively worthless. So the mechanics could destroy
the whole grand experiment, not only for themselves but for all the rest
of United's staff as well. The Wall Street Journal recently suggested
that that was actually what the mechanics were after: To call a halt to
it, take their lumps, and be ready to come back when the airline is reorganizedas
outsiders. You can't be an adversary to the guy in the mirror, heh.

I've heard it said in many places that you don't really own what you
can't sell, and under that philosophy ESOP (employee stock ownership plans)
aren't really ownership at all. That may also be what rankles the unions:
They got what they thought were ownership and control, but in terms of
the free market they actually got neither.

United will probably go under and return. There are still hubs, and planes,
and plenty of demand. What there won't be next time is employee ownership.
There are often reasons that things are the way they are, and that's one
of the things that worthy experimentslike this oneshould tell
us.

December 3, 2002:

I've been reading the reactions of others to
His Dark Materials, and I think I may have seriously misread its
intent. It's really not fantasy at all, but science fiction, and much
less metaphysical in nature than I originally thought. So let me think
about it for a bit before commenting further.

In the meantime, I rented and have been walking to the extended version
of Part 1 of TheLord of the Rings. It was interesting to
see the scenes that were readmitted to the film after (presumably) being
swept up off the cutting room floor. There's a little more footage of
life in the Shire, and considerably more of Lorien, including an initial
view that redeems it a little from the dour gloom that most of its scenes
convey. I confess I don't much like the way they portrayed Galadriel,
but apart from that it's about as perfect an adaptation to film from text
that I've ever seen. There was more butchery of orcs at Amon Hen (which
I'm sure I could have done without) and a couple of glimpses of Gollum
that I don't recall from the original, though Carol reminds me that I
unwisely guzzled a sizeable Diet Pepsi at lunch last December and had
to run out and pee twice during the film, which has no intermissions.

I wonder if anyone noticed any footage cut from the original theatrical
release? I noticed the absence of only one sliver of a scene: During the
battle in Moria, after the first wave of orcs gets cut down, Boromir (with
an odd tone and a slightly goofy look on his face) says, "They've
got a cave troll!" That was cut from the extended version.

The Two Towers will be in theaters in about ten days or so, and
I confess, I can't hardly wait. It's true, there's way more battle scenes
in the second book than I'd like, but now we get to see the Entsand
they're one of my favorite parts of the whole trilogy.

Definitely rent the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring
before seeing The Two Towers. Highly recommended.

December 2, 2002:

I finished Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials
trilogy last night. I can describe it with two words: Audacious...and
bungled.

Audacious, because it's a conflation of Paradise Lost, David Brin,
and Gnostic dualism. Nominally, it's about a megalomaniac human being
who attemps to mount an attack on God the Father Himself (actually, the
subdivine Gnostic uberangel called the Demiurge) and two 12-year-old kids
who have cool adventures in several different universes. The trilogy represents,
in fact, two almost entirely distinct stories, one of which is brought
to completion, while the other sort of fizzles on the sidewalk like a
Fourth-of-July snake pellet after a few seconds of interestingly pyrotechnic
twists and turns.

The first book, titled The Golden Compass in the United States
(Northern Lights elsewhere) is pretty good. The second book, The
Subtle Knife, is terrific. The third book, The Amber Spyglass,
is a total botch. The problem is pretty obvious to me, since I've faced
the very same challenge: How to pull together a few too many plot threads
at the end of the epic, with all the loose ends neatly tied up. Here,
some ends are tucked in a little, some are chopped off rudely in the middle,
and a few are left completelty hanging.

Oh, and not delivering what you promisethat's another problem.
I was expecting a totally cosmic battle of good versus evil, waged on
both the physical and metaphysical planes. Instead I got zeppelins shooting
at helicopters somewhere over Siberia. I was promised a reprise of the
Temptation in the Garden of Eden, and got...nothing, as far as I can tell.
Pullman forgot that thread completely. Toward the end of the epic, his
metaphysics started to get inconsistent, and looked more and more like
Harry Potter. Not good.

It's always hazardous to guess the metal state of the author, but I got
the distinct impression that somewhere along the way, he lost his taste
for the cosmic battle stuff, and really wanted to concentrate on the relationship
between the two kids. I think his publisher may also have been pressuring
him to wrap it up already. There was easily another entire book's worth
of material he could have done, and I would have bought it, read it, and
enjoyed it. Another book, if well-crafted, might, in fact, have saved
the story's bacon in the end.

The other objection I have to the book is that it is extraordinarily
dark, and full of pain and death. By the middle of The Amber Spyglass,
I was thinking that if this were a Greek tragedy, the stage would be thigh-deep
in corpses. There is no humor, no exhilaration, very little triumph, and
no love that isn't ultimately tragic. Do we want our 12-year-olds reading
that sort of thing?

More tomorrow.

December 1, 2002:

Back in Scottsdale. While we were in Chicago
last week, my sister gave me the recipe for beef stew as she learned it
from my mother, and today Carol and I set out to duplicate it, with pork
instead of beef. We've done well with my mother's beef soup and my father's
hamburger-macaroni-veggie stir fry thing he called "gumgash"
and it was time to try something new.

We needed potatoes, onions, carrots, parsnips, and an apple. So Carol
sent me off to Safeway, and then, in the far corner of the produce department,
it occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea what a parsnip
looked like. I'd eaten them at home often enough (usually in stew) but
by the time I got to them they were little cubes of stuff that looked
like yellowish potato. In their native form, well, I was clueless.

Safeway didn't help. In what I called the "minority vegetable case"
there were several little bins of odd-looking plant organisms, arranged
in a cluster three deep. Above the cluster were several price tags arranged
linearly: Artichokes, ginger root, rutabaga, parsnips, horseradish, turnips,
kohlrabi, and something Mexican-looking whose name I have forgotten. Ok...so
now find the parsnips...

I knew artichokes, turnips, and horseradish by sight, and I tagged the
ginger root with a quick sniff test. So it was down to rutabaga, kohlrabi,
that Mexican thing, and parsnips. Clueless. I suppose I could have asked
the produce manager and looked totally stupid, but just then a middle-aged
woman rolled her cart up to the veggie case and grabbed a couple of artichokes.
I said, "Excuse me, do you think the parsnips look fresh enough to
use in stew?"

She grabbed this carroty looking thing, turned it in front of her face,
and said, "Sure. I've seen better, but they're not bad."

I thanked her, threw two of what she'd grabbed into a plastic bag, and went
home happy.